On the 152nd anniversary of her birth (editor’s note: plus one day, because this editor is on a research trip and didn’t have time to get to the blog yesterday!), all of us at Cranbrook Art Museum are excited to wish artist and designer May Morris a very happy birthday! Born March 25, 1862 in Bexley Heath, England, May Morris grew up in an artistic community fueled by the beliefs of her father William Morris, a founder of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Intellectually committed to her father’s movement, she learned needlecraft at the feet of her mother Jane, a Pre-Raphaelite model and muse for Morris and others.

As an adult May Morris advocated both for her father’s artistic movement and for women’s involvement in art through needlework. She traveled the United States for five months between 1909 and 1910, lecturing on the Arts and Crafts movement and women’s role in the arts. Exposed to the women’s rights movement growing in the United States in this period, Morris became a champion for trade unions and women’s arts guilds—a move that earned her the dislike of many Arts and Crafts leaders, including Gustav Stickley.

It was during this lecture tour that George Gough Booth first encountered Morris’s work. Ten years later Booth purchased these bed-hangings—designed by Morris and executed by Morris and fellow needleworker and teacher Mary Newill—from a 1920 Detroit Society of Arts Crafts exhibition featuring Morris’s work and that of other British Arts and Crafts artists. Designed in 1916, the bed-hangings were first exhibited at the Eleventh Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London in the same year and were published in The Studio: Year-Book of Decorative Art in 1917. George and Ellen Booth loved the bed-hangings, which they hung in Cranbrook House until 1955.

There are few things that history buffs love more than archives, and there is almost no archive that can rival—digitally at least—the Internet Archive for sheer volume and accessibility. Looking for a late 19th-century trade catalogue for a New York lantern company? They probably have that. Interested in Princeton University’s 1886 Scientific Expedition? Well, read all about it. What about former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to Morocco in 1957? Enjoy!

Every once in a while, though, a researcher comes upon a treasure that feels strangely personal. That is exactly what happened when I was bumming around on the Internet Archive and stumbled upon this compilation of 1948 Oldsmobile “Minute Movies.” This blog is all about Cranbrook sightings off-campus; places where Cranbrook-related artists and makers have put their mark on the world. This sighting, though, is of historic Cranbrook in a digital world. Starting at the 0:53 second mark, the film Ahead Automatically features a suspiciously familiar backdrop: the Cranbrook Art Museum and Library peristyle. Carl Milles’s Orpheus Fountain is front and center as the attractive young actors ooh and ah over their friend’s “Futuramic” Oldsmobile.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Cranbrook’s bucolic campus was the ideal setting for automobile advertisements. Geographically close to the office parks and factories of the Big Three automakers, it looked worlds apart from the urban and industrialized landscape of the Detroit metro area. For an automaker selling a lifestyle as well as a car, there were few places that said “lifestyle” quite as well as Cranbrook. Dotted with Eliel Saarinen’s architecture and Milles’s sculpture, Cranbrook’s campus became synonymous with a certain perspective on the world: youthful, engaged with art and culture, and forward-looking—all ideal qualities for the owner of a “Futuramic” Oldsmobile.

Eagle eyed viewers might notice that the house that appears in the first segment of the video is also familiar. We’re pretty sure that is the Affleck House, a Frank Lloyd Wright gem of a home built in Bloomfield Hills and operated as a historic house museum by Lawrence Technological University.

The story of Cranbrook and car goes deeper than simply advertisements. In March Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research will partner with the Bloomfield Hills Township Library to present a talk on Cranbrook’s automotive connections. Sponsored in conjunction with the current exhibition A Driving Force: Cranbrook and the Car, this lecture will tell the story of Cranbrook Academy of Art graduates who worked in the automobile industry at the midcentury. For more information, visit the Bloomfield Hills Township Library.

Posted by Shoshana Resnikoff 2012-2014 Collections Fellow Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research

I love Cranbrook’s impressive history of 20th century art and design, but sometimes a girl needs to revisit her roots in the 18th century. It was with that in mind that I went out to New York’s Americana Week at the end of January. For fans of 18th and 19th century American decorative arts, Americana Week is like Woodstock. Auction viewings followed by thrilling sales, museum exhibitions devoted to “brown furniture” or master craftspeople, and of course, the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory, where dealers, collectors, and academics gather to see the historical treasures that have resurfaced in the past few years.

This year was my second time at the Winter Antiques Show and I was looking forward to connecting with old friends, both human and furniture (I’m looking at you, 18th century japanned high chests). I figured I’d be leaving Cranbrook behind for the weekend, but what I stumbled upon instead was a Paul Evans Moment.

A Cranbrook Academy of Art student in 1952, Paul Evans crossed boundaries between modern design and historic craftsmanship when he went to work as a craftsman at the living history museum Old Sturbridge Village. Evans created enormous, heavily-decorated furniture pieces that showcased his metalsmithing skills while blurring the lines between functional and sculptural in industrial design.

In fall of 2013 the James A. Michener Art Museum will be staging a retrospective of Evans’ work, after which Cranbrook will play host to the exhibition. As the museum gets into the swing of exhibition planning for the coming year, Paul Evans is the talk of the office. So while I’d totally expect a Paul Evans encounter at Cranbrook, running into him surrounded by Queen Anne chairs and 18th century samplers was a surprise.

After I got over my initial shock, however, it suddenly made sense to see Paul Evans at the Armory. As we begin to take a longer historical look at the twentieth century, there is something meaningful about contextualizing Evans within the history of American craftspeople. The Winter Antiques Show is all about examining and celebrating the objects made by talented artisans over the course of three centuries, and Evans’ work situates him right smack dab in the middle of that. His tools may have been welding equipment rather than awls and hand saws, but Paul Evans is yet another story in this long tradition of people producing “stuff” that blurs distinctions between beauty and functionality and of creating art that can be used in the most immediate of ways.

At the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, we spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves. That sounds self-centered, but it’s the nature of the job – we uncover connections between different areas of Cranbrook, building historical and cultural relationships that help us to better preserve Cranbrook history and shape its future. Cranbrook doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though, which is why it’s important for us to take a step back and look at the larger Cranbrook connections out there in the world. And really, what better place to start than 18th-century Canada?

I know that sounds crazy, but run with me on this. In 1759 the British war hero General Wolfe was killed at the Battle of Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham, a battle which the British won. Posthumously celebrated as one of the great British military leaders, General Wolfe and his heroic death were immortalized in both art and literature. In 1770, the American expat artist Benjamin West tried his hand at the subject, painting The Death of General Wolfe. Ultimately, that painting, and the five later versions also made by West, went on to become the iconic image of General Wolfe and a symbol of the British empire.

The Death of General Wolfe, Benjamin West, 1776
William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan

But what does this have to do with Cranbrook? Well, in 1928 William L. Clements bought one of the six identified General Wolfes and donated it, along with his extensive library of early Americana, to the University of Michigan in order to build the William L. Clements Library. In the same year, George Booth bought a version of The Death of General Wolfe on the understanding that it was also a Benjamin West. Booth’s General Wolfe is very different from the other versions, however, and there has long been debate over whether the painting is actually a West. Regardless of its origins, however, The Death of General Wolfe has hung in Cranbrook School for over 80 years.

The Death of General Wolfe, attributed to Benjamin West, 1791
Cranbrook School

Fast forward to 2012 when the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) borrowed the Clements Library’s The Death of General Wolfe to showcase it in an incredible exhibition called Benjamin West: General Wolfe and the Art of Empire. When the information about this exhibition came across a desk at the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, it was like a light-bulb went off. Two versions of The Death of General Wolfe just 45 miles apart, each purchased in 1928 by avid collectors? Could there be a more perfect Cranbrook connection? And with that the Day Away program was born.

The Day Away program is about exploring Cranbrook connections with the wider world, and so on December 1st a group of Cranbrook enthusiasts spent the day immersing themselves in all things Wolfe and West. We started the day at Cranbrook School’s Page Hall, where CS instructor Jeffrey Welch described the historical context for Booth’s acquisition of General Wolfe and I gave a brief overview of Benjamin West, providing a visual analysis of the features of both paintings.

Day Away participants bravely gathering early in the morning for a brief lecture on West and Cranbrook at Page Hall.

From there we boarded a bus and drove to Ann Arbor. At UMMA we were met by exhibition curator Carol McNamara, who took us through Benjamin West: General Wolfe and the Art of Empire. Her masterful analysis integrated the painting into a constellation of objects that ranged from a lock of Wolfe’s hair to mundane household goods. By examining the material culture related to General Wolfe, Carol was able to show how West’s painting became the defining image of the general, transforming him into a symbol for the newly formed British imperial identity and enshrining Wolfe within the pantheon of great British leaders.

UMMA exhibition curator Carol McNamara explores connections between the material culture of the late 18th century and the mythology surrounding General Wolfe.

Following lunch at the Kelsey Museum of Archeology (where a few of us slipped away to catch a glimpse of the incredible Tiffany window installed in the Kelsey’s reading room) we finished our day at Clements Library. Housed in an Albert Kahn-designed building that the architect described as his greatest achievement, the Clements is one of the worlds’ greatest repositories of early American written and printed material. Director Kevin Graffagnino spoke with us about the history of the Clements and its future plans. He set us loose on the library and even let us page through some of their treasures. Not only did the visit further contextualize The Death of General Wolfe into the world of 18th century colonial politics, but it highlighted even greater the Cranbrook connections. Here was a temple to history and learning, dreamt up by a passionate collector and designed by a great architect of the twentieth century. Replace “early Americana” with “art and education” and you have Cranbrook in a nutshell.

Alfred Kahn’s masterpiece, the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

With our time at the Clements coming to a close, we boarded the bus and headed back to Bloomfield Hills. On the bus ride back we took an informal vote whether or not we thought Cranbrook’s General Wolfe was really a West. As a group we decided that no, it probably wasn’t. Still, we won’t know for sure until a West expert checks it out. Even if the bus group is right, though, and Cranbrook’s Death of General Wolfe is not by West, we can still look at the painting hanging in Cranbrook’s Page Hall and see not only a history of 18th century British military heroism but also a record of Cranbrook connections that extend beyond the 319 acres of this campus far out into the world.

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CRANBROOK SIGHTINGS

CRANBROOK SIGHTINGS is Cranbrook Art Museum’s multi-author blog featuring Cranbrook “sightings” near and far—from our campus and vaults to countries abroad—related to our collections and exhibitions. Its contributors include the Art Museum’s staff and their colleagues at Cranbrook as well as guest writers. CRANBROOK SIGHTINGS is edited by Shelley Selim, the Art Museum’s 2013-2015 Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow. If you would like to pitch an idea and serve as a guest writer, please contact Shelley at SSelim@cranbrook.edu.